Odalisque with Slave (1842)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Odalisque with Slave

Here is Ingres's most famous painting, previously seen as a drawing here. This is the second version of this painting that he did; the previous one was entirely indoors, while this version has a garden in the background. This painting was commissioned by King Wilhelm I of Württemberg and was executed by Ingres with the assistance of his pupil Paul Flandrin.

Ingres was known publicly as the great upholder of le pur classique as well as the most vociferous opponent of Romanticism and its excesses, personified by Ingres’ arch-rival and opponent Delacroix, painter of rape and murder and affray, in the hues of blood and fire. “I smell brimstone,” Ingres used to say, whenever Delacroix walked into the room. But the picture reproduced here, a dreamily erotic, sensually overloaded fantasy of a concubine’s life in some imaginary Near Eastern harem, shows that Ingres himself was a more passionate and romantic artist than he cared to admit. As the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire perceptively noted, “one of the things that distinguishes Monsieur Ingres is his love of women: his libertinism is serious and full of conviction.”

Odalisque with Slave is an Aladdin’s cave of sensual enticements, set in a space decorated by a proliferation of dancing patterns and designs, painted in such a profusion of sharp and bright colors that it has an almost narcotic intensity of effect. At the center of it all, semi-swathed in a bolt of white drapery and posed amid extravagant crumples of blue and gold satin, like a half-unwrapped gift, the painter has arranged the reclining form of an oriental Venus.  The startling, pearly whiteness of her skin is made to seem all the more emphatic by contrast with the duskier complexions of her two attendants, a black eunuch and a turbaned slave playing a Turkish lute. The cheeks of Ingres’ odalisque are slightly flushed and her long golden hair flows across her striped pillow and down to the floor like a river. Apart from these two traces of color, and the delicate touches of pink that define her nipples, she is a marmoreally pale object of desire. Posed like a classical sculpture, she rather resembles a statue in the process of coming to life. Ingres may have intended this effect, meaning it to suggest a woman’s gradual awakening from languorous torpor to a more passionate mood. The eunuch looks pointedly away and out of the scene, an expression which could merely express deference to his mistress, or indicate the imminent arrival of a guest. Perhaps she is indeed expecting a visitor. The bold red column in the background is an interestingly phallic addition to the scene, while the slight turn of the odalisque’s head and the movement of her eyes heightens the air of sexual anticipation.

The image has its origins in a study drawn from life some months earlier, just before the artist had taken up his post in Italy. On that drawing, which still survives, Ingres made a note of the name and address of his Parisian model, a certain Madame Felix of 4 Rue du Chaume. He also jotted down several alternative titles for a finished painting to be based on it – “Sleep”, “The Siesta”, “The Sultana at Rest” and “Italian Woman Taking a Siesta”. His mind was made up by a re-reading of one of his favorite books, the so-called “Embassy Letters”, describing life in Turkey, written by the eighteenth-century traveller and author Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Ingres’ notebooks contain a passage copied verbatim, describing the Englishwoman’s visit to the house of a Turkish concubine: “One entered into a vestibule paved with marble whose design formed the most beautiful mosaic. From there, one proceeded to a room surrounded by sofas, on which one could rest before entering the bath… Around this bed there burned, in golden censers, the most agreeable aromatics of the East, and here several women devoted to this purpose awaited the sultana’s exit from the bath to dry her beautiful body and rub it with the sweetest oils; and it was here that she subsequently took her voluptuous relaxation…” [Andrew Graham-Dixon Archive]